Neptune's Empty Throne

The slide down from denouement can be exhausting. 

It's been nine months after the surprise election where navalists regardless of their political leanings were suddenly juiced by a President Elect who ran on a 350 ship Navy. With time though, the adrenaline is leaving the blood, the keg is empty, and everyone is wandering around trying to find their favorite hat they let some girl wear about 3am.

Time to sober up.

It takes more than just the right people with the right desire to grow the fleet. There has to be the money, political sponsorship, and an effective process and structure to make it happen.

With the calm and light of time, the reality is setting in that things may be more difficult.

Over at War on the Rocks, Bryan McGrath back in 2014 had a bucket of cold reality for everyone to ponder then, and not that much has changed three years later.

To get to where we want to go, we may need to change the structure that is supposed to help get us there if and after the money shows up. What we have right now? It may support something, but building the effective fleet the nation requires may not be it. The names may have changed, but the process hasn't;

...whose job is it to describe the Navy we need, rather than the Navy we can afford? Is it Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert? Maybe in days gone by, but the Goldwater-Nichols Act did a fine job of removing any incentive for service chiefs to advocate for their own service’s particular contributions. Chiefs of Naval Operations of late tend to do their yeoman best to build and maintain navies that are affordable. Is it Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus? Perhaps, but any SECNAV who advocated for a Navy that exceeded the controls passed to it by the OSD Comptroller would find him or herself in hot water with the Secretary of Defense, if that person did not agree and could/would not provide top cover. Maybe then, it is the Secretary of Defense. A secretary with gravitas could sit down with the president and the Director of OMB and argue for greater resources for DoD, if he felt that the Navy we needed greatly exceeded the Navy we can afford.

The point of all of this is that we have created a system in which it is very difficult for any individual with authority to do or say anything effective to address the mismatch between the Navy this country needs and the Navy it currently claims to be able to afford. Worse yet, there are penalties to be paid for doing so. The one individual with the mandate to do so is the president, ....  

The U.S. Navy is to some extent, a victim of its own success. It consistently provides presidents with flexible options for response and it rarely has to say, “No, we cannot do that.” Unless a president comes into office with the idea that the nation must begin to prepare for the rigors of great power competition again, the Navy will appear sufficiently sized to meet the requirements of crisis response, for these are the requirements against which its size and capabilities are resourced. And since there is no bureaucratic incentive for anyone within the chain of command to advocate for such preparation in the absence of presidential leadership, we may unfortunately someday find ourselves with a navy we can afford, but not the one we need.

Is the new president and his team, pulled in all directions and yet to be fully staffed, really able to invest the time and political capital to push for a larger fleet? When you look at the rack-and-stack of what they must invest their time and effort in - from Korea to Syria - Iraq to Afghanistan - and more ... who will lead the push and get noticed above the ambient noise?